Moa

Wet-hopped Sour Ale

4.9% ABV - alc./vol.

Dinornis robustus, the South Island giant moa, may well have been the tallest bird ever to walk the Earth. It and its close cousins in the eight other moa species were the dominant herbivores on these islands for millennia and they still loom large in our imagination, even though they are forever gone from the landscape. Only bones and stories remain.

After evolving — just like everything else — through a rich and unrepeatable history of countless circumstances and coincidences, their demise had one all-too-simple cause: us humans. Needless to say, there’s a lesson in that.

On a vastly smaller scale, our ‘Moa’ embodies a little of life’s beautiful randomness; a colony of Lactobacillus bacteria was let loose in the brew kettle to create a sour ale base which was finished off with fresh, unprocessed cones of Nelson Sauvin hops. The unpredictable action of the microbes and the unguessable character of raw hops means that this beer can’t ever be made the same again.